O! Thou Dangerous Dialectic!

This is the big term paper I wrote for my class on the Philosophical/Theological Psychology of Soren Kierkegaard. I feel like a lot of good thought came out of this project, even if it was a beast to finish. Enjoy.

"O! Thou Dangerous Dialectic!:
An Analysis of the Relationship Between Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception Within Despair in The Sickness Unto Death"

In the introduction to the section of The Sickness Unto Death where he expounds despair as defined by consciousness, Kierkegaard directly relates the degree of despair in a person to the degree of consciousness in that person. He says, “The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to its increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair” (1). Consciousness and despair, then, are directly proportionate to each other; whenever they are found together (that is, whenever a self is not in faith, or resting transparently in the power that established it), one’s increase or decrease is marked by the other’s increase or decrease, respectively. To illustrate this point, Kierkegaard gives the example of the despair that is suffered by Satan: “The devil’s despair is the most intensive despair, for the devil is sheer spirit and hence unqualified consciousness and transparency; there is no obscurity in the devil that could serve as a mitigating excuse” (2). This point is well-taken, for it similarly seems true that—as Kierkegaard himself will quickly address in this section—one who is hardly conscious of being a self can hardly despair, at least in despair proper as defined by Kierkegaard.

But what is it of which a person is growing in consciousness as that person also grows in despair? Kierkegaard believes that this consciousness is that of his despair itself. He says, “To the extent that a person has the truer conception of despair, if he still remains in despair, and to the extent that he is more clearly conscious of being in despair—to that extent the despair is more intensive” (3). Thus, as long as one remains in despair (that is, as long as one is misrelating himself to himself and to the other), the more he understands despair, the greater his despair will be. Likewise, as one grows in despair, one grows in the knowledge of one’s despair. If this is true, and despair is the misrelation of the self to the self and the other (including God), then it appears that, as one becomes further and further despairing, one will come to a further knowledge of himself and the other (including God). This is so because in order to know how one is in misrelation to a thing, one must know how one ought to be relating to that thing, and in order to know how one ought to be relating to a thing, one must have at least some knowledge of oneself and that thing.

Thus, as one grows in despair, one will grow in the knowledge of oneself and the other. But how can this be? It seems intuitive to me that as one grows in despair, as one becomes further misrelated to oneself and to the other, one further skews his picture of reality—one further deceives himself. Further, after establishing that sin is intensified despair in the second main section of The Sickness Unto Death, when refuting the Socratic definition of sin as ignorance, Kierkegaard himself says, “That is why Christianity begins in another way: man has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right” (4). Thus, when in sin, one is not only ignorant, but is himself willfully ignorant concerning the truth. Is it possible, then, that as one deepens in despair (sin), one grows in knowledge of self and other and simultaneously deceives oneself concerning this knowledge? What are we to make of the phenomenon of self-deception in light of Kierkegaard’s analysis of the different forms of despair? My project is thus to further exegete and analyze these different forms of despair as laid out by Kierkegaard, particularly in terms of how self-deception plays a role in them, hopefully in order to determine how it is that self-knowledge and self-deception relate both to each other and to the phenomenon of despair.

“The Despair That Is Ignorant of Being Despair, or the Despairing Ignorance of Having a Self and an Eternal Self”

It is here, in Kierkegaard’s treatment of what he describes as the lowest form of despair, that I hope to establish a model for how self-knowledge and self-deception relate in despair, and then later apply, test, and if necessary, revise that model in regards to the various, more advanced forms of despair. Being that this form of despair is firstly and primarily marked by the ignorance of being in despair, Kierkegaard begins this section with a treatment of ignorance in relation to what he calls “the obstinacy of truth” (5). He says,

"That this condition is nevertheless despair and is properly designated as such manifests what in the best sense of the word may be called the obstinacy of truth. Veritas est index sui et falsi [Truth is the criterion of itself and of the false]. But this obstinacy of truth certainly is not respected; likewise, it is far from being the case that men regard the relationship to truth, relating themselves to the truth, as the highest good, and it is very far from being the case that they Socratically regard being in error in this manner as the worst misfortune—the sensate in them usually far outweighs their intellectuality" (6).

Thus, the obstinacy of truth presents itself in truth being both its own standard as well as the standard of falsehood—truth insists on having its own way and will not accept anyone else’s. This is perhaps what Kierkegaard means when he says that this obstinacy is “in the best sense of the word.” He goes on to say, however, that this truth-imposed standard of truth is more than often not given proper respect—it is often ignored. Most men, says Kierkegaard, do not care enough about truth and their relation to truth to be properly related to it, primarily because they do not view being in relation to truth “as the highest good.” Further, he says that this is due to the disproportionate importance that these men place upon their sensual desires, rather than their intellectuality. Men ignore the truth and thus become ignorant to it.

Kierkegaard goes on to further describe the ignorant man’s relation to truth:

"For example, if a man is presumably happy, imagines himself to be happy, although considered in the light of truth he is unhappy, he is usually far from wanting to be wrenched out of his error. On the contrary, he becomes indignant, he regards anyone who does so as his worst enemy, he regards it as an assault bordering on murder in the sense that, as is said, it murders his happiness. Why? Because he is completely dominated by the sensate and the sensate-psychical, because he lives in sensate categories, the pleasant and the unpleasant, waves goodbye to spirit, truth, etc., because he is too sensate to have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit" (7).

This ignorant man, according to Kierkegaard, believes himself to be happy, but only because he is ignorant—that is, this man is happy only because he does not know of his despairing state. Truly, ignorance is bliss for this man. Were this man to stumble across the truth, or were truth to be forced upon him, he would more than likely do everything in his power to continue ignoring the truth, for “he is usually far from wanting to be wrenched out of his error.” Why? Why does truth and any truth-bearer become his enemy? It is because, as Kierkegaard says, “it [truth] murders his happiness.”

Truth is a category of spirit, and thus it calls the man beyond the immediate sensate categories of “the pleasant and the unpleasant”; it calls man to deny himself the immediate, the purely sensate pleasures, to “have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit,” and thus to suffer through the despair of consciousness. But as has been said, this sensate-driven man will do everything in his power in order to continue ignoring the truth. He will construct elaborate systems—systems “embracing the whole of existence, world history, etc…” (8) as if to be sheltered within these systems from the harshness of truth and reality. However, as says Kierkegaard, we are surprised on one level to find that this sensate man cannot live as though the systems he has created for his shelter are actually true. Thus, the man “himself does not personally live in this huge, domed palace but in a shed alongside it, or in a doghouse, or at best in the janitor’s quarters” (9). On another level, this behavior is not surprising at all, for we can see that as truth begins to impress itself upon him, and as his consciousness of despair may be beginning to grow, the ignorant man may no longer be able to hold up his façade of a palace. He may be no longer able to convince himself that the shelter he built for his protection and distraction from reality will actually protect and distract him because truth itself—the truth that is impressing itself upon him—is revealing to him that this shelter is only a figment of his imagination.

But still he must fight this increasing knowledge, this increasing violation of truth upon his ignorance, in order that he may protect his immediacy, or else his “spiritless sense of security” (10) will collapse upon itself. As Kierkegaard says, “when the enchantment of illusion is over, when existence begins to totter, then despair, too, immediately appears as that which lay underneath” (11). How can this champion of immediacy maintain his illusion so as to not have to come to terms with the emptiness, the despair that lies beneath it? Simply enough, he must will even more strongly to ignore the truth about himself. He must resolve even more firmly to deny the real as the real presents itself even more firmly to him. This, I believe, is the model of the relation between self-knowledge and self-deception within despair—that of the irresolvable tension between complete dialectical opposites. When one is in despair, as one grows in the knowledge of oneself and of the other—and in the knowledge of despair itself—one must simultaneously harden and strengthen one’s resolve to ignore those truths and deceive oneself.

A necessary condition for the growth of one’s despair, then, is the growth of the tension of the opposition between self-knowledge and the will to ignorance (12). It could be also that as one grows in the consciousness of despair, that growing awareness, that ever-growing feeling of despair, may in fact be a phenomenology of that very opposition. As one grows more despairing, one may feel the ever-increasingly grating tension between those things that one knows about oneself, and those things that one cannot accept as being true about oneself for fear that they, being true, will destroy the already fragile self-security provided by remaining within one’s false immediacy. Thus, in order to protect his immediate happiness, maintained through his sensate categories of “pleasant” and “unpleasant,” this man must even more fervently will his own ignorance—his ignoring of the truth—and thus continue to willfully deceive himself.

We can easily see what kind of monstrous dialectical trap in which this man has been caught by reflecting upon the doubly-antithetical nature of his situation. Not only is he dialectically caught between his increasing self-knowledge and his immediacy, and thus is resigned to having to “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (13), but this suppression is by nature self-defeating. The tension found within in this suppression, this self-deception, clashes essentially with the goal of the immediacy to which the suppression is in service, that of his happiness. So, in the attempted protection of his immediate happiness, this man actually sets it up in a dialectic of opposition with his own growing self-knowledge, potentially suspending the fulfillment of both of them infinitely. He is trapped in the limbo between the two, never able to attain either.

Here, for the sake of clarity, it will be helpful to consider a potential counter-argument to our present hypothesis. It might be argued that this dialectical tension is in fact impossible because it appears impossible to simultaneously come to self-knowledge and suppress that knowledge on the same level of consciousness (14). Fundamentally, this objection comes down to a simple affirmation of the law of non-contradiction, for it seems that one cannot know a proposition about oneself (affirming A) and simultaneously deny that proposition (affirming ~A). This is true enough, but this is not what occurs within this dialectic of opposition between self-knowledge and self-deception. Rather than both occurring simultaneously, the two interplay with each other in a coextensive, indefinite succession—that is, they incessantly dialogue. The person in this dialectical tension, in despair, is constantly torn back and forth between the inescapable truth and the necessity of its suppression. Thus, this counter-argument simply does not apply to our hypothesis.

“The Despair That Is Conscious of Being Despair and Therefore Is Conscious of Having a Self in Which There Is Something Eternal and Then either in Despair Does Not Will to Be Itself or in Despair Wills to Be Itself”

At this point, obviously, we will not yet be able to witness the full effects of how this dialectical tension plays out in the deeper forms of despair because we have still only dealt with despair that is unconscious of its being a state of despair—despair that has its immediacy still intact, that has not yet entered the dialectical opposition between self-knowledge and the will to ignorance. Technically speaking, then, we have not yet witnessed this dialectic at all for the same reasons; we have seen only the possibility of the beginning of this dialectic, as truth first begins to impress itself upon the man who has not yet come into any knowledge of himself as spirit. As a reminder, the present reflections upon this possibility have arisen from our reflections upon the indignation of immediate man toward any who would disturb his immediacy by presenting him with that which transcends his immediacy—truth. In order to truly see this dialectic at work, we must begin investigating the forms of the despair as defined by consciousness that are actually conscious of being despair, beginning with the despair that does not will to be oneself.

It is important to notice that in the short introduction to this subsection of the first part of The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard himself notes something like what we have explicitly labeled as the dialectic between self-knowledge and self-deception. He begins this introduction by describing how growth in despair in necessarily accompanied and aided by the growth in the knowledge of what despair is. As we too have noted, this is because, in growth in the knowledge of the nature of despair, one begins to understand the reality of despair as being a condition of the eternal self. However, the full understanding of this reality does not come immediately upon one’s first encounters with despair. On this, Kierkegaard says, “On the one hand, then, the true conception of despair is indispensable for conscious despair. On the other hand, it is imperative to have clarity about oneself—that is, insofar as simultaneous clarity and despair are conceivable” (15). Thus, from the language he is using, it appears that Kierkegaard himself believes that there is some dialectical tension between the clarity that presents itself as self-knowledge and the self-deception found within despair. Going on, he says of the despairing man,

"To some degree, he is aware of being in despair, feels it the way a person does who walks around with a physical malady but does not want to acknowledge forthrightly the real nature of the illness. At one moment, he is almost sure that he is in despair; the next moment, his indisposition seems to have some other cause, something outside of himself, and if this were altered, he would not be in despair" (16).

Here, it appears that Kierkegaard is implicitly assuming the kind of dialectic—that coextensive, indefinite succession of self-knowledge and self-deception—that we have previously described. The man with this despairing sickness has a moment of clarity; he understands that he is in fact sick with the sickness unto death, and that he himself is the continuing cause of this illness. This self-awareness, however, is quickly replaced by the thought that the illness, “his indisposition,” is not being and could not be caused by himself and the dialectical tension growing within him. He could not truly “acknowledge forthrightly the real nature of the illness”, being within his own eternal self, and act upon that, for that would require him to abandon his immediate happiness—it would require him “to venture out and to endure being spirit” (17). He must distract himself from the reality that his own self presents him with, by trying “to keep himself in the dark about his state through diversions” (18). Even more explicitly, Kierkegaard says shortly later in the section, “There is indeed in all darkness and ignorance a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing…” (19) that is, a dialectical interplay between coming to knowledge and willing to ignore or suppress that knowledge. Thus, the man in despair enters the tension of this dialectic of opposition.

Despair that does not will to be itself can be further broken up into the categories of the despair over the earthly or something earthly, and the despair of the eternal or over oneself, and it is here that this dialectic between self-knowledge and self-deception begins to rear its ugly head. This earliest form of conscious despair—that is, the despair over the earthly or over something earthly—is birthed out of the immediacy of the despair that is unconscious of being despair. Since in this self, there is yet “no infinite consciousness of the self, of what despair is, or of the condition as one of despair…” (20) Kierkegaard says that this despair “is only a suffering, a succumbing to the pressure of external factors; in no way does it come from within [the self] as an act” (21). Thus, the dialectic must be begun from the outside, since the self, being trapped in its immediacy, will simply continue in its immediacy; it is only from the outside that the self can be given dialectical inertia, since that which is at rest tends to stay at rest. Conscious despair—the dialectic of opposition between self-knowledge and self-deception—thus begins passively. In the same vein, Kierkegaard remarks shortly thereafter,

"Now something happens that impinges (upon + to strike) upon this immediate self and makes it despair. In another sense, it cannot happen at this point; since the self has no reflection, there must be an external motivation for the despair, and the despair is nothing more than a submitting. By a “stroke of fate” that which to the man of immediacy is his whole life, or, insofar as he has a minuscule of reflection, the portion thereof to which he especially clings, is taken from him; in short, he becomes, as he calls it, unhappy, that is, his immediacy is dealt such a crushing blow that it cannot reproduce itself: he despairs" (22).

As before, Kierkegaard here affirms the violent nature of the onset of this despair; something “impinges” or strikes upon the immediacy of the self, causing this immediacy to shatter, and throwing the self into despair. This despair is thus completely passive in its nature, as we have remarked. But what, then, is acting upon the self, shattering its immediacy?

I argue that this force is truth itself, both because truth is not a category of the immediate, but rather of the eternal, and because truth is obstinate (that is, it insists on entering center stage and setting the standard for all), and thus is not easily ignored. In revealing itself to a person of immediacy, truth, in its eternality, forces open the door on the happy illusions that distraction and complacency has allowed him to maintain, both transcending and crushing his categories of “the pleasant and the unpleasant.” As soon as this person’s illusions—“the portion [of his immediacy] to which he especially clings”—clash with reality, the truth concerning how he has misrelated himself to himself and to the other leaps into the spotlight, and if he is capable of any reflection at all, the self-presentation of this truth launches him into the dialectic of opposition between growing self-knowledge and growing self-deception. If the person is in fact incapable of reflection, if he is one of those “happy” few, then, as Kierkegaard says, he will simply suffer the duration of the despair, and once the immediacy in question is restored, he will return to his previous “happy” state, though nonetheless still unconsciously despairing (23). It matters not how large or small are the first steps onto this dialectical path, how great or insignificant the first inconsistency between illusion and reality, how blatant or subtle the first revelation of the misrelation; once the reflection upon the truth concerning oneself has taken hold, the dialectic also takes hold and begins to have a life of its own.

Once this first step has been taken, and the man begins to despair and reflect on his despair, he attempts to take measures to save his self from it. However, “his struggles are in vain; the difficulty he has run up against requires a total break with immediacy, and he does not have the self-reflection or the ethical reflection for that” (24). This man cannot simply will away his despair and transcend the despairing dialectic of opposition because he cannot transcend his need for immediacy, his need for the protective shroud of his illusion for the sake of his immediate happiness. Thus, rather than transcending the dialectic, he must perpetuate it by providing the response—he must will to suppress the truth about himself and deceive himself. He attempts to temporarily abandon himself, hoping that the problem will go away when he does so. As Kierkegaard says, “As long as the difficulty lasts, he does not dare, as the saying so trenchantly declares, ‘to come to himself,’ he does not will to be himself; presumably this will pass, perhaps a change will take place, this gloomy possibility will probably be forgotten” (25). This man wishes to escape himself because he has identified himself with the immediacy which has been called into question by the revealing of the truth of the misrelation of his self to himself and the other; thus, this man is in the despair to will to not be himself. If the truth about this man’s misrelated self does not further present itself to him—if truth never equally or superiorly answers his will to deceive himself—then it may be that he succeeds in suppressing this knowledge, and will actually forget that “gloomy possibility,” thus passing back into the immediate “happiness” of ignorance he once possessed (26). It is possible, however, that if he is never able to restore his former “happiness,” and thereby deceive himself back into immediacy, he will continue to despair over the earthly for the rest of his life. We ought to note, though, that if this is the case, the dialectic will be suspended, and thus this man will never slip into deeper forms of despair, just as if he were to pass back into his previously undisturbed immediacy. Before we think of this as a good thing, however, we must remember with Kierkegaard that this will also suspend this man’s journey to salvation.

When passing from the despair over the earthly into the despair over oneself (and of the eternal), the dialectic between self-knowledge and self-deception does not change in nature, but rather in intensity. While despair is technically always of the eternal, as Kierkegaard points out (27), there is indeed a shift in moving from the despair over the earthly to the despair over oneself in that the awareness—the consciousness—of one’s despair is fundamentally deepened. This shift is a further movement in self-knowledge because, for the first time, the object of despair—that is, the self itself—is recognized, and not merely recognized as such, but recognized as the source its own despair. For whatever reason, probably due to some monumental poignant failure of the person—a failure highlighting a fundamental weakness of the person—the person in despair comes to understand that he himself is the problem, as he misrelates himself to himself and to the other. Of this consciousness of one’s weakness, Kierkegaard remarks, “Consequently, there is only a relative difference, namely, that the previous form has weakness’ consciousness as its final consciousness, whereas here the consciousness does not stop with that but rises to a new consciousness—that of his weakness” (28). Before, in the despair over the earthly, the man in despair was certainly despairing in weakness; he simply did not yet know it. Following this previously mentioned failure, the man is finally made aware of his own weakness, and despairs even further in that awareness.

The poignancy of this failure and its corresponding weakness has made the growth in the knowledge of self-as-misrelation nigh impossible to avoid. This step is thus the next natural movement in the dialectic of opposition between self-knowledge and self-deception. For, once the truth concerning oneself-as-misrelation has been suppressed in the previous manner—that is, in separating from oneself until immediacy is restored—truth’s proper response in raising the stakes is to reveal that the thing from which we had attempted to escape is not only the problem, but also that it is in fact inescapable. Thus, upon reaching this level of despair, there is understandably an enormous intensification of the dialectical tension, such that whether one simply sits in this immediacy-smashing self-knowledge, or can somehow manage to find the strength of spirit within himself to continue the dialectic of opposition and will his own self-deception even in the face of such a revelation, he is miserable. On this revelation, Kierkegaard states, “He now becomes more clearly conscious of his despair, that he despairs of the eternal, that he despairs over himself, over being so weak that he attributes such great significance to the earthly, which now becomes for him the despairing sign that he has lost the eternal and himself” (29). We can see here that the self from which the despairing person previously attempted to distance himself was in fact his real self, his eternal self, which he rejected in favor of the false self in which he could preserve his immediate happiness. And now, fearing that he may have lost that which was eternal in him, he despairs. Of course, looking in from the outside, we can see that he does still have his eternal self, this being evidenced by the simple fact that he has had the strength and resistance of spirit to continue the dialectic and reach such depths of despair.

But what of the other option? Could it be possible to continue the dialectic of opposition still further yet, and summon up such strength of spirit as to will one’s own ignorance in the face of such blatant self-knowledge? This is possible only by standing truth on its head, by making oneself the standard of the true, and by judging the world according to this standard. This is precisely what occurs in the man, who, still unwilling to submit to faith, despairs to will to be oneself in defiance. Here, as Kierkegaard says, “If the person in despair goes one single dialectical step further, if he realizes why he does not will to be himself, then there is a shift, then there is defiance, and this is the case precisely because in despair he wills to be himself” (30). Thus, the man who in despair wills to be himself defies all of truth and reality because it will not let him retain that in which he finds his immediate happiness (those categories of “pleasant” and “unpleasant”). Further willing his own ignorance, he reassembles reality is a way that suits that which he wills himself to be. “On closer examination, however,” Kierkegaard says, “it is easy to see that this absolute ruler is a king without a country, actually ruling over nothing; his position, his sovereignty, is subordinate to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment” (31). We clearly see, then, that this man is truly the most deceived of all, even though he has had the most self-knowledge, become a stronger spirit, and participated in the eternal far more than those who are ignorant of their despair. In fact, it is precisely because he has seen more of the truth and continued to will to reject it (and not only that, but he willed to remake it) that he is the most deceived of all.

Thus, in examining how it is that self-knowledge and self-ignorance could exist together within the phenomena of despair, we have seen that the relationship between these two states within despair is one of dialectical opposition—a coextensive and indefinite succession of opposites. This dialectic is ever building, raising the stakes at every exchange. It begins with truth’s first appearance, breaking into the immediacy of ignorant despair, and culminates in the defiance and complete self-deception of the man who in despair wills to be himself, thus casting an image of reality in his own image. This man has perfected the despairing dialectic of opposition, rather than transcending this dialectic by submitting to his maker in faith, and thus fully given himself over to the sickness unto death.


Endnotes:

1. The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Hong and Hong, pg. 42.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., pg. 48.
4. Ibid., pg. 95 (emphasis mine).
5. Ibid., pg. 42.
6. Ibid., pg. 42-43.
7. Ibid., pg. 43.
8. Ibid. Kierkegaard certainly seems to be referencing Hegel’s philosophy in saying this. This would imply that Kierkegaard believes that Hegel’s motives in doing speculative philosophy are primarily derived from his sensate-psychological need to repress, ignore, or perhaps to distract himself from reality. Whether this was actually the case for Hegel, I know not. However, if Kierkegaard is truly referring implicitly to Hegel in speaking on the repressive nature of philosophical systems, that Kierkegaard thought this was the case appears to follow.
9. Ibid., pg. 43-44.
10. Ibid., pg. 44.
11. Ibid.
12. Whether this is a sufficient condition for the growth of despair is another matter, and obviously remains to be proven.
13. Romans 1:18 NKJV
14. I am indebted to Michael Garten for his very astute thoughts, both in this specific counter-argument, as well as his valuable feedback and conversation in regards to this paper as a whole.
15. SUD, trans. Hong and Hong, pg. 47.
16. Ibid., pg. 48.
17. Ibid., pg. 43.
18. Ibid., pg. 48.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., pg. 50-51.
21. Ibid., pg. 51.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., pg. 52-53.
24. Ibid., pg. 55.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., pg. 55-56.
27. Ibid., pg. 60.
28. Ibid., pg. 61.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., pg. 67.
31. Ibid., pg. 69.

Love and Peace in Our Lord Jesus Christ,
Garrett